Word: albums
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...STICKER on the cover of the Clash's new album describes it as "18 new songs from the only band that matters," and though that rings of promotional hype, the Clash have never been a band to go along with hype. They've played a little trick on their promoters, andtackedanother song to the end of their double album without listing it on the jacket, or telling the guys who wrote the ad copy. That's the keynote for the music on this album: it presents a world gone slightly askew and takes a sort of grim joy in pounding...
Ellen Shipley might not have written, never mind recorded, Heroes of Yesterday, one of the best tunes on anyone's album this year, if she had not been booted out of her theater class at Hunter College. "You ought to be out of here doing real things," her professor told her, so Shipley (born Shippelkopf) swapped her half-finished master's for a series of the prescribed real things, including marriage, playwriting and a job as an assistant to the music critic of Saturday Review. The marriage shattered, the play never got produced and the magazine got sold...
...certain difficulty of gender, even regarding the slang. Standard record-biz patois for new talent on the rise is "breaking out." A quartet of plastic inflatable Teddy bears like the Knack, who came off the crackling short circuit of Los Angeles rock clubs and had a No. 1 album first time out this summer, are said to be breaking out in a big way. That message is clear, not just because of the size of their success but because they are all guys. Say that four women, Ellen Shipley, Carolyne Mas, Ellen Foley and Pat Benatar, are breaking out with...
...woman," Shipley says, "it's vulnerability or strength. People want to push you one way or another." These four are not averse to a little push. All of them take great, if sometimes contrary, care with their album photos (Benatar's picture makes her look like a black widow Piaf) and, in hallowed Hollywood tradition, Shipley and Foley decline to give their ages. Still, these women give some indication that if they do not find a fresh new direction, they may at least open up a different route...
Ellen Foley can cut loose with the power, too, but her training was strictly Broadway, and her big break came on the Meat Loaf Bat out of Hell album, where she undercut Loafs buffalo bellows with some full-throated purring. The most overtly sexual of this quartet, Foley tries for what she calls "the woman-child look," but turns out more like an F.W. Woolworth vision of Lana Turner. "Rock 'n' roll is about rhythm and movement," she reminds us, then supplies a footnote on anatomy: "Your sex is very close to your heart...